New Video, New Europe

A Survey of Eastern European Video January 11 – February 22, 2004

Arturas Raila(Lithuania)The Girl is Innocent, 199917'

Despite the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc, Soviet-era rhetoric dies hard, or at least it does at the Vilnus Secondary School of Fine Art, where Raila used to teach. (He was fired for making this piece.) The candid footage from a teachers' conference held in 1998, captures, in his words, "entrenched anti-Western undercurrents usually withheld from public view." Indeed, they seem to be flaunted during the student critiques where young artists are criticized, even penalized, for succumbing to the decadence of the class enemy, namely Pop art.

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